Unofficial news and tips about Google

January 28, 2011

Google Filters Suggestions Associated with Copyright Infringement

Google started to filter search suggestions that include terms associated with copyright infringement like "torrent", "bittorrent", "rapidshare", "megaupload". It's a slippery slope and Google's suggestions will be less useful since they'll no longer include many popular searches.

Last month, Google explained that this is one of the changes intended to address copyright infringement. "We will prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete. While it's hard to know for sure when search terms are being used to find infringing content, we'll do our best to prevent Autocomplete from displaying the terms most frequently used for that purpose."

Blacklisting keywords like "torrent" is a terrible way to prevent copyright infringement since users can always type queries without Google's help. The main consequence is that Google will appear to be broken and users will no longer trust the suggestions because they're censored. Last year, Google started to become politically correct by removing the suggestions for queries like [why are muslim]. There will always be complaints about the suggestions, but starting to arbitrarily blacklist keywords opens a can of worms and makes it easy to remove other controversial suggestions. As Mashable says, "this is a subtle form of censorship, and at first glance it seems trivial. However, even though the censorship is slight, it still indicates Google's willingness to change its search protocols to satisfy the needs of a certain business group, in this case members of the entertainment industry."

IANAL, but could it be that they're concerned that suggesting to append e.g. "torrent" to a search for a popular movie name may be seen as encouraging illegal behavior? That would explain why they don't attempt to filter "torrent" etc from searches (which I'm sure would be easy to do).

Google is backbone of internet and people mainly trust on the Google results. If this kind thing like filter suggestion or search query should be remove or will be a copy right protected. We can not able to get information about any thing which we want to know.

it makes sense since suggestions are information that is pushed to you.Google does not want to suggest you should search this terms (or show you such results before you end your request) . But it does not prevent you to explicitly search for it.Completely fine for me.

I think this has less to do with political correctness and more to do with avoiding copyright infringement suits. If the big guns can show Google suggested certain illegal sites, I can see how it would be a lot harder to defend a copyright infringement suit. (I suppose I'll learn more about this in the copyright class I'm taking, this semester.)

What I get really concerned about is the type of censorship involved in the Muslim example. If Google starts to drift into the activist land of blocking off certain sites/suggestions because a handful of activists shout that they promote hate speech . . .

For example, I would be deeply troubled if Google mirrored Apple's censorship of the Manhattan Declaration because some people find it "offensive." Here's what I said about that censorship.

I agree with some of the commenters above that this is reasonable. Since 'true grit torrent' might be a more common search than other 'true grit t*' searches, Google's autocomplete would basically be encouraging searches of copyright-infringing materials. Moreover they would be passively educating their userbase about the existing of torrents, et al.

As long as they aren't censoring the actual search results if you can be bothered to type out 'torrent', I'm fine with this.

So Google Instant doesn´t show it, but Google shows it if you hit "Search"? In other words the the feature that sets apart Google from the other search engines now doesn´t do what every other search engine doesn´t do? Baaad.

you guys complaining about this only shows that don't surpass the level of noobie on this subject. what google did here was simply the auto suggestion not show more "pirate" hints, the one who know how to do a search on web will easily find whatever he wants (evens if is illegal)..